Does anyone else feel contempt toward fragility and naïveté in others?
Had a conversation with my coworkers today after one of them saw a horrific car accident happen. She was understandably upset about it. It had happened the previous day. Conversation shifts toward crazy shit we’ve all seen.
I don’t remember how we got there but she started talking about how she was thinking of not coming into work today and stuff. And I felt…I dunno. She said some other stuff about how sensitive she is and how she’s not used to seeing that kind of thing and it’s so bad for her mental health etc.
The other person started telling a story and the questions she asked about things were so…naive? And the other person mentioned this and she fell back on the whole “but I’m just a sheltered (white) girl from (small town)…”
And I notice she does that a lot. Falls back on the I’m just a sheltered (white) girl from (place). And then I noticed my other white friends have done this before too when asked why they didn’t know something or why they did something a certain way.
And the other person’s story is about how their partner (another white woman) was warned to leave a dangerous area by a man with a knife on him and she stayed and tried to talk to him.
And I was thinking to myself like: I am a Black woman. I have never and will never be rewarded or protected for this level of naïveté. I will be taken advantage of, and then discarded. The end. And here are all these people, really leaning into it as a personality trait, “teehee I wouldn’t know that…” and I felt…disgusted. Like how did you get this far in life without knowing basic survival skills?
She asked me how I survived without a cellphone back then. Without skipping a beat I said: “I have a brain and I know how to read.” We were laughing and joking. But I was serious.
And then when I told my story of creepy stuff happening it was like “I’ve never experienced that” but there was a tacit like “I’m not ghetto so I wouldn’t know that anyway” that comes with it sometimes like…other people tell stories and it’s like “wow that’s crazy” and I tell people stories and it’s uncomfortable. She didn’t say that but that’s how it usually feels.
It was triggering. Today was triggering.